The New Age is going to be a time when we awaken to our responsibility as human beings for the fate of our planet. Not only the fate of humanity, but of all the kingdoms that share our planet.
Robert: Welcome. Inner Sight is simply seeing that which is always present, but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is the New Age. All of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey, as does the following thought: “A higher and more living energy is most active at this time, and its resultant idealism and consequent New Age concepts are playing upon sensitive human minds and preparing humanity for a great and much-needed change.” I think that thought needs a lot more exploration. We’ve discussed the New Age before. What do you think is meant by that term?
Sarah: Well, the New Age probably brings up all kinds of thoughts in the minds of our listeners, but probably the most significant aspect of what is meant by the New Age in the writings of Alice Bailey is that it concerns a cycle or a period of time that will last approximately two thousand years, and it’s a period into which we are just entering at this time. It can be verified by astrological formulations, but whether or not you believe those could be accurate, I think everyone can sense that the times, as Bob Dylan said, “they are a-changin” and we are entering into a new period. I think it’s part of why we have such a sense of the unknown ahead of us and not really a sense of security about the future. Well, what the New Age suggests is that because things are changing and so many accepted values and principles are shifting, it’s a time when new things can enter in, new realizations, new ideas. To me, that’s very positive, very creative. I suppose some people find it a little frightening.
Dale: Well, yes, but people always seem to find change to be a little frightening at first.
Sarah: I love it!
Dale: Sure. But I’m just going to say, we’ve been through this before. If there is a new age, then there must have been an old age, and there certainly was.
Sarah: And we’re all products of it.
Dale: That’s right. We are the culmination of this old age.
Sarah: I rest my case. (laughter)
Dale: The last two thousand years prior to this time constituted the old age. It has, as you mentioned, an astrological symbol that goes with it. There was the old Piscean age—the previous two thousand years—and this age that we’re coming into now is the Aquarian age, and that’s the sign of the water carrier, which is symbolic of selfless service. We can go into these symbols a little later, I guess.
Sarah: None of these ages starts and stops on a dime because we can look back over the last, say, one hundred and fifty years and see signs of the New Age approaching. I think a lot of people think of the sixties as a time of the New Age, the dawning of Aquarius, the musical Hair, the hippies, the flower children of San Francisco and all. That’s kind of the perennial symbol of the New Age, but maybe closer to one hundred and fifty or one hundred and seventy years ago, there were the transcendentalists of New England.
Robert: Oh, yes, Emerson and Whitman.
Sarah: Right, and they were a really progressive and experimental group of intellectuals and cultural creatives, I guess we could call them, who were trying to develop new ideas about divinity, about man’s place in the world and so on. The transcendentalist movement was very forward thinking in its approach to spiritual values, not at all bound by traditional religion. And there were the utopians who believed they could create a perfect society by all living together and the Shakers, the Christian Scientists, there have been a number of different movements, but those are all harbingers, I suppose, of something that’s really getting underway now. I think essentially the New Age does hinge on spiritual values. There’s a lot about the New Age: crystals and rainbows and so on that don’t have anything to do with real spirituality, but at the core of it is a belief that God is imminent within every human being. One of the kind of humorous and sometimes ridiculous misinterpretations of that realization is the distorted belief that one thinks, “I am God.” That’s silly. But the old traditional religion taught that God was transcendent, which divinity is. It stands apart from the created world. But God is also present within every aspect of the manifested world, and this the New Age is emphasizing.
Dale: That inner divinity of God is, of course, embodied in the soul, the human soul, and the soul on its own level. That is the great quality that must come more to the foreground in the New Age. It’s one of the qualities that must begin to take control of the affairs and happenings in the world at this time; so, in the next two thousand years.
Sarah: To me, one of the interesting repercussions or effects of that philosophy is that it highlights personal responsibility of every intelligent, sane human being, that the fate of the world can’t be left up to some unknown power that manipulates everything on Earth, but that the soul within every human being gives us the power to create and to redeem the world. The New Age, I think, is going to be a time when we awaken to our responsibility as human beings for the fate of our planet. Not only the fate of humanity, but of all the kingdoms that share our planet. So, it’s a time when humanity is really entering into its spiritual adulthood, hopefully, and will begin to play a more conscious and active role in how we relate to each other, how we relate to the other kingdoms, how we handle or respond to the Earth itself, the effect we have on it. Ecology is, I think, a wonderful example of the growth of the New Age movement. The awareness that everything is interrelated and there’s a harmonious balance that has to be protected.
Dale: Yes, I think it’s important to point out that these are not just arbitrary ideas that are beginning to manifest, or that always manifest during these ages, because every age that we experience—and there have been many before this one—has its particular quality that it is attempting—on the part of God and the inner guides of humanity—to instill certain qualities into human consciousness. They’re building constantly on what came before, and that’s the same today. The New Age will build on the qualities that were developed during the last two thousand years. So, it’s an ongoing process. With each transition into a new age, there’s a new quality, a new emphasis that is being played upon human consciousness.
Robert: How would you characterize the Piscean Age as compared to the Aquarian Age? What would be the major differences with the two?
Dale: Well, I think the Piscean Age was an age of devotion where we had great ideals and we developed world religions, and the Aquarian Age will build on those religious principles and carry them further.
Sarah: I think that’s so true. Evolution doesn’t just sort of lurch along, but it follows the spiral. We return to all of these patterns and approach them on a higher level. There’s a statement made by Christ in the New Testament when he forecast the new age when he would return and he told his disciples to look for a man carrying a water pot—which would be the symbol of the Aquarian server—and he also said that “I am come that ye may have\ life more abundantly.” I’ve often puzzled over what “life more abundantly” would mean. I think that what he was referring to was the redemption of life on earth, not in some heavenly hereafter, but the redemption of our earthly life. When you think about it, he was born in a cave deep within the Earth, and he died in a cave from which the stone was rolled away and he supposedly ascended. Well, I think that’s deeply symbolic of his relationship to Earth, and that we also have to have that deep connection to the planet, to the physical realm, because only in that way can we redeem earthly life. We cannot live as if what we do on Earth doesn’t matter or doesn’t have any effect. This whole concept of the merging of spirit and matter, of divinity and the outer form is something that in the New Age I think will be understood and honored.
Dale: And in fact, the exact purpose for the Alice Bailey writings is to advance that understanding and she provides what I like to call a window into the inner spiritual realms, and these books are a tremendous opening to this inner world and it advances and deepens one’s understanding of your relationship to God.
Sarah: They certainly do emphasize the theme of personal responsibility for one’s spiritual development and the fact that you have to demonstrate your spirituality by the way you transform your outer life and relationships, and again, that’s very much a realization of the New Age. It’s said that her books were intended to precede and condition the New Age. I think what that implies is that in the New Age, each human being, through his soul, will take responsibility for his own development rather than leaving it up to some external spiritual authority. This is something that I think annoys a lot of more traditional, conservatively minded people about the New Age spiritual beliefs: that the church, the temple is not respected enough. I don’t think that’s it so much as that people believe that the ultimate spiritual authority lies within them, in the soul.
Dale: That’s what has to be brought forward.
Sarah: It’s dormant.
Dale: Here again, it’s the Piscean versus the Aquarian perspective. Previously it was God transcendent that has been emphasized, the God out there who will save you and lift you up into heaven. Now the emphasis is shifting to that God within which is the real savior, and it provides the way and the light by which one may save oneself.
Sarah: The books of Alice Bailey are full of techniques and guidance on how to awaken that inner guidance through meditation and especially through service: the life lived for something greater and larger than one’s own self-interest.
Dale: And this is leading humanity, leading all of us to something even greater, you see, that’s way down the road, that’s on the horizon, but it’s an emerging of the kingdom of humanity to the next kingdom of God, that spiritual kingdom, the fifth kingdom in nature. So, all of this is preparation for an understanding of this great happening, this great advance into the spiritual realms in human consciousness.
Sarah: Maybe we could say that some of the signs that we can already see of the New Age would be the growth of group consciousness and of a commitment to service. If we look at the last twenty or thirty years, the many groups dedicated to service: Doctors Without Borders, the United Nations volunteers, Physicians for Social Responsibility, one could go on and on at the growth of groups committed to service. Also, a new approach to rituals and ceremonies. Have you noticed how people like to conduct their own wedding ceremony, write their own vows?
Robert: Certainly not part of the Piscean age, I guess.
Sarah: No. Not the traditional way to do things, but they invent their own ceremonies, a resistance to outside authority.
Dale: And just the organization of your daily life.
Sarah: By ritual?
Dale: Well, yes, I mean, daily life is kind of a ritual. You go through the same process in the morning, you get up and get ready for work, have breakfast, you go to work, you come home, and there is a rhythm to it, an ebb and flow. This is very much a new age kind of condition that is just automatically developing.
Sarah: I wonder if that lies behind the excessive regulation of time that people seem to have today. Every minute is filled and every bit of their day is organized and they schedule so much that they “overschedule” as the phrase goes. I wonder if that’s part of that.
Dale: Yes, that’s a response to this new quality that is coming through under the Aquarian influence. There is a certain energy associated with Aquarius that tends to impress the need to organize on a human being if they’re very sensitive to it. I think there is a greater sensitivity now in human consciousness to this factor of organization and creating order either in one’s life or in one’s business or in the nation or in the world because there is a great reorganizing going on. Also, the growth of large worldwide organizations—that’s very much an Aquarian characteristic, I think.
Sarah: Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the New Age is the belief that life can be lived creatively, that one isn’t just a pawn or a hapless victim of whatever fate might bestow upon him, but that we can create and build our lives. I think this is something people just expect now—this very positive view of life that it can be changed and transformed but we have to take it a step further and focus on transforming our own consciousness. Not the outer aspects of our life but transforming the way we see the world and our fellow human beings.
Dale: I think it’s also taking us out of ourselves and there’s a great need to do that, especially with the emphasis upon service that comes with Aquarius. This is another one of the ideas that is being impressed on human consciousness by these new energies that are pouring in: selfless service and the development of group consciousness which is a soul consciousness actually. Group consciousness is soul consciousness and wherever you see this growth of the group idea that is very much influenced by the soul.
Sarah: As I mentioned, Alice Bailey’s books were intended to precede and condition the New Age but it was said in her writings that prior to the next stage of the teaching that would be given to humanity after her books were written, we should focus on “rebuilding the shrine of man’s living” and “reconstructing the form of humanity’s outer life.” I think that’s really interesting: that the focus is on redeeming and revitalizing the outer physical structures of our world. Never can you turn away from the outer forms. The spiritual values have to be manifested in visible, tangible form in a better world for everybody.
Robert: You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called The Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of The Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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